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 Issue
2
Things look bleak for Senior Developer Angie Baxter this month, as her project
turns pear-shaped and the vultures start to circle. Help’s on its way though, in the
twinkling of an eye…
Monday
8.45 am and Kevin and I are in Mike’s office for a progress meeting on Drivers
Allowances, although as Mike points out it’s really a lack-of-progress meeting, since
that’s what we’ve achieved. I can’t believe I was glad to get onto this
project – every possible thing has gone wrong, and now we’ve got the users
baying for our blood, led by Dave Hayes from Southampton who’s legendary for sticking
spokes in our wheel at every opportunity. Worst of all, the big bugs are all in the
interface between the depot front-ends and the server-side application code – and
that, of course, belongs to yours truly. Kevin says we’ll definitely have it sorted
by the weekend, though on what basis I haven’t a clue.
Tuesday
Denny swans back in from the Microsoft Tech.Ed conference which was held, to everyone
else’s intense annoyance, in the south of France. As expected he’s unbearable,
going on all morning about hanging out with his developer mates, and shouting “ODBC
is dead, long live OLE DB”. Carl shuts him up by throwing a DDE manual at him, but by
afternoon he’s at it again, telling us how Bill said this and Bill said that until
Sammy, bless him, reads out a trade paper story saying that Bill wasn’t actually
there, but talking via a satellite link which broke down. The Redmond box is now the Nice
box as well – each time Denny mentions either place he has to put a quid in, and
it’s filling up nicely.
Wednesday
Kevin’s given me a pile of MSDN Library CDs and told me to keep looking until
I’ve found the cause of the DA crashes. After endless screenfulls of “How to
Pass a UDT to an OLE Automation Server” I’ve got a blinding headache and
I’m still no nearer a solution. Things are looking grim – the word is that Brian
Wood’s preparing an AS/400-based counter-bid with heavy backing from IBM, and
I’ve been here long enough to know that if we lose the project I’ll be the
fall-girl. Perhaps I’m being over-pessimistic though, as Mike came through earlier
and told me not to worry as help is on its way. In the meantime, whatever the answer is I
won’t find it in “How to Navigate Excel Objects from Visual Basic”, so I
scroll on to the next topic.
Thursday
Mike calls Kevin, Carl and Denny in for an urgent meeting, and from the looks on their
faces it’s momentous stuff. Fearing the worst I reach instinctively for the weeklies
(“18 months OLE/SQL Server banking experience” looks promising) but Penny says
not to worry as Mike’s pulled off a real coup. Then the guys emerge, still
sober-faced, and Kevin tells me that we have a new colleague, Liam Thompson from the
AS/400 team. I’m amazed, as Liam’s the firm’s resident genius, and Brian
Wood must have fought like mad to keep him. I also see why Carl and Denny look so worried
– with Liam around on a salary rumoured to be as much as both of theirs put together,
there might not be room for all of them. It’s unlikely to affect lowly me, though, so
I Ioad another MSDN CD and keep browsing.
Friday
Talk about wasting no time – Liam’s arrived and is already working on the DA
interfaces, with me as his assistant. He has an almost unworldly calmness, and although he
says he doesn’t know much about OLE, I can tell he’s already got a better grasp
of it than I have. At 4:30 he says he’d like to try a couple of mods, so we fire up
the testbed – and it works. I tell him that’s incredible, but he just smiles his
twinkly smile and says a fresh pair of eyes often does the trick. To my utter shame I
can’t help swooning a little, despite the fact that he’s got a pony tail and
I’ve got a very nice boyfriend. That at least gives Carl and Denny something to grin
about, and we all troop off to spend the Redmond/Nice kitty, which now contains enough for
a round.
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Issue 2 - Contents
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Angie >
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Issue 1
Issue 2
Issue 3
Issue 4
Issue 5
Issue 6
Issue 7
Issue 8
Issue 9
Issue 10
Issue 11
Issue 12
Issue 13
Issue 14
Issue 15
Issue 16
Issue 17
Issue 18
Issue 19
Issue 20
Issue 21
Issue 22
Issue 23
Issue 24
Issue 25
Issue 26
Issue 27
Issue 28
Issue 29
Issue 30
Issue 31
Issue 32
Issue 33
Issue 34
Issue 35
Issue 36
Issue 37
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